In the spring of 1989, it seemed that a new revolution was brewing in China. The student protests turned into great dissatisfaction with the current situation in the country, and the smell of change and democratization was already in the air. However, on June 4, all this was suddenly interrupted, crushed by the decisive reaction of the ruling Communist Party, which sent tanks to Beijing’s Tiananmen Square against the bare-armed people. According to the official Chinese version, no one died at Tiananmen, and according to various versions, the number of victims ranges from several hundred to several thousand. The exact number has never been established, and immediately in the summer of 1989, Chinese-American director Christine Choy shot a documentary film about Chinese dissidents who found exile in America.
Now, more than three decades later, even today, 70-year-old Choy and all the surviving protagonists of her film were found by the duo Violet Columbus and Chris Klein and made a documentary that was awarded the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. Both narratively and structurally, “The Exiles” is an unusual, completely atypical documentary. In the beginning, we meet Choy, that thin, eccentric, loud woman who never drops a cigarette from her hand, and we first find out who she is. Then in her company, the authors find a few Chinese dissidents that Choy filmed 30 years earlier. Just like her, they were young people or middle-aged people then. And now people are 55, 60 or 70 years old. People late in life who were never allowed to return to China after Tiananmen.
Some of them still live in America, some are in Taiwan, and it is as much a film about China from the late eighties as it is about China today. We listen to those people who were convinced that their country would change quickly and that it was simply impossible for it to continue to be an unfree, one-party dictatorship. But, look at the miracles, even today China is all that, even though, as we well know, in the meantime it opened up to the world and became perhaps the world’s leading superpower. And it’s not the country they once hoped for, it’s not the one from which they had to flee, and it was certainly an interesting film, just for reflection.